A blog about the design, construction and evolution of our home - The Rendezvous, built by Ventura Homes in Perth, Western Australia

Friday, July 22, 2011

Milestone: Internal Colour Selection

When it came to interior colour selection, we decided to keep things simple by selecting the same colours and materials throughout. This may seem a bit boring at first, but it allows us to accessorise each room individually, whilst maintaining a common feel between rooms.

We decided the best place to start making our selections was the kitchen. Typically, the kitchen is a home’s central gathering point. This is especially true for us. We love to host large dinner parties, where we spend all night sitting around the dining table. Therefore, it is crucial that we get the colours right!

Our current kitchen is quite small. It has silver cupboards, which look fantastic. However, we felt using a feature colour, such as silver, in a much larger kitchen would be over powering. We decided to play it safe and chose white cabinets - “Classic White Sheen” melamine by Polytec.

Choosing a bench top colour was not as straight forward as choosing the colour for our cabinets or kickboards.

Paired with the silver cabinets of our current kitchen, is a lovely black granite bench top. Despite the “extra work” to keep it clean, we would have loved to continue this trend into our new home. Fortunately/unfortunately, our builder supplies Essastone and we decided that it would be best to stick with that.

To be honest Essastone does not wow me. The current Essastone range has three colours that would suit our white/grey/black colour scheme: Carbon, French Black and Midnight Rendezvous.

The winning colour, by elimination, was Carbon. If it were not for the large black flecks in the French Black, it would have been the likely choice because the base colour complements our floor tiles. Midnight Rendezvous, unfortunately, would have left us longing for our current black granite bench tops. Essastone just does not have the shine, depth or warmth that granite has.

Kitchen Colour Scheme: floor tile,
bench top, cabinet and kickboard

﻿Unfortunately, our budget did not extend to having Essastone bench tops in the Laundry. For this room Ventura’s colour consultant recommended using Laminex Basalt (Natural Finish) for the bench top, as it is the best match for Essastone Carbon.

Our final colour choice for the day was kickboard colour. Our colour consultant suggested brushed aluminium. In theory this would have looked great, however when paired with our chosen floor tiles, an aluminium kickboard became lost.

We decided to choose a darker kickboard. We did not want to be so bold as to choose black kickboards, so we opted for Laminex Charcoal (Natural Finish).

It is always a good idea to take samples of your kickboard, cabinet and bench top colours when you go searching for tiles. If we had not done this, we would not have realised that brushed aluminium was too light a colour to use for kickboards.

Another interesting observation was the influence of our tiles on Charcoal kickboards. When paired with white, Charcoal appears to be dark grey in colour. However, when paired with our floor tiles, it appears more blue.

Thankfully, this does not cause a problem in our colour scheme, however it is something worth keeping in mind, especially if you are choosing a more specific or bolder colour scheme than we are.